


Nobody Kicks Agnes Out of Day Care

by whimsicalwombat



Category: The Blacklist (TV)
Genre: F/M, Ressler is So Done with Tom's escapades, but the main tag is;, kind of crack-y kind of serious, ok ok this one got way out of hand, the team will do anything for Agnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-20
Updated: 2018-08-20
Packaged: 2019-06-05 17:52:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15176120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whimsicalwombat/pseuds/whimsicalwombat
Summary: Agnes is framed for a spate of missing items at her day care centre and Tom, determined to prove her innocence, ropes in a somewhat reluctant Ressler (then Aram, and then Samar) to help him uncover the truth... All of which has to happen before Liz returns home from work for the day....AKA, the one where four grown, trained adults use their operational talents to investigate a bunch of toddlers and one rude, grumpy, centre manager, because how dare anyone accuse Agnes of inheriting her parents' skills?





	Nobody Kicks Agnes Out of Day Care

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Takada_Saiko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Takada_Saiko/gifts).



> Ok ok so this is kiiiind of not what you asked for but it also kiiiiind of is, and it got way, *way* out of hand and I had way too much fun with it, even though I don't typically write Tom or Keen2 so here's to hoping it's in character and you love it :D
> 
> Happy hiatus fic exchange, my fabulous friend :D
> 
>  
> 
> [](https://www.flickr.com/gp/152300685@N03/12Lkcx)  
> 

**_TOM..._ **

'You're not serious,' Tom sputtered, 'she's _three._ Three year olds don't think like that.' The manager of the Sunny Hill Day Care Centre simply stared back at him, unmoved by his outburst. Tom let out a sigh, his gaze flickering downwards to the dark haired little girl idling at his feet and scowling back at the manager just as he wished he could. For a moment, Tom wondered how on earth they had reached this point. It seemed utterly ridiculous and yet, there they were.  

It had started off as any other day did; dropping her off at day care that morning after Liz had left for the Post Office, and before he was supposed to go about his own errands for the day... And then the day had taken an unexpected turn. The day before, for the umpteenth time, Agnes had come home from day care with something missing from her backpack –in this case, her water bottle- and they were steadily growing more and more exasperated with the centre's apparent lack of care for personal belongings that led to them constantly having to replace them. That morning, when dropping her off, Tom had decided enough was enough. It was time to ask the staff what was going on.

And then they had dropped the bombshell.

Stealing. The centre was plagued by a spate of personal belongings performing disappearing acts, and they were convinced that one of the kids was responsible... And Agnes was their number one suspect.  

Pointing out that her own items had gone missing too did nothing to relieve the suspicion. The manager had even gone so far as to suggest that Agnes was simply hiding her own belongings in an effort to shift the blame onto someone else. Tom was far from convinced; he wasn't entirely sure that Agnes had even figured out how to lie yet, let alone try to frame another child, but the manager of the centre had always been short with them ever since realising that Liz was the same Elizabeth Keen who had been labelled by news outlets the world over as a fugitive a few years earlier. As far as the manager was concerned, Agnes was obviously picking up bad habits from her criminal parents, and there was no point in even _thinking_ about looking into any other suspects.

'Well apparently, Agnes does think like that,' the manager huffed. 'We've spoken to her about it, but she was resistive-'  
'-because she didn't do it-' Tom tried to interject, but she continued over him;    
'-so perhaps it'd be better coming from you.' The steely-eyed woman paused a moment, crossing her arms for effect. 'We don't tolerate that kind of thing here, it needs to stop.'

Tom blinked. That was a threat –a threat to kick Agnes out if the stealing that she _wasn't doing,_ didn't stop. He shook his head, running a frustrated hand through his hair. There was nothing more he could say to the woman. Arguing wouldn't help, not when she was so determined not to listen to reason.  

So, he needed evidence.  

Clenching his jaw and shooting the woman one last grimace of irritation in response to her withering gaze, Tom scooped up Agnes into his arms, and strode out of the centre.

He was going to get that evidence. He knew Agnes wasn't the child responsible for all the missing items, he just needed some help to prove it.  

And he knew exactly who to call.

/*/*/*/*

**_RESSLER..._ **

The shrill ringtone of his phone made Ressler glance absentmindedly away from his paperwork to the now lit up screen of the device sitting somewhere across his desk. The sight of Tom's name flashing across the screen prompted a wary eyebrow to raise, but Ressler hit the 'accept call' button anyway, lifting the phone to his ear.

He didn't have time for this. They were hot on the heels of their latest Blacklister, with Liz having already been whisked away by Reddington's private jet to corner the guy in who-even-knew-where, and Ressler himself madly scouring the latest pile of evidence reports to find the smoking gun –so to speak- before they got there.  

...But if Tom Keen was calling him, something was going on, and Ressler couldn't deny the inkling of curiosity to know what it was.

'What, Keen?' He answered the phone, tone clipped.    
'Nice to hear your voice too, Ressler,' Tom's voice echoed back through in response. Ressler didn't even bother stifling the eye roll. To say the relationship he had with Tom Keen was complex was an understatement. Some days they were almost friends, other days they were far from it –but no matter what day it was, they always agreed on at least one thing; fondness for one Special Agent Elizabeth Keen.  

'Why are you calling me?' Ressler sighed. If he didn't have time for the call, he certainly didn't have time for the pleasantries or small talk. He needed to get straight to the point.  
'I need your help,' came the quick response.  

Ah, there it was. That was typically the reason Tom called him. At least it was as straight to the point as it could possibly get.  

'You do remember that your wife is a federal agent too, right?' Ressler's lip quirked up with the tiniest hint of a smirk.  
'I can't ask Liz,' Tom muttered back. Even through the phone, Ressler could practically hear the darker haired man rolling his own eyes back at him. 'It's for Agnes. Her day care centre is accusing her of stealing. I know she didn't do it, but they're threatening to kick her out over it.'  

 _That_ caught Ressler's attention.  

'And I don't want to tell Liz before I prove that Agnes didn't do it,' Tom went on, 'or she'll come home from your case and end up storming straight into the day care centre with her angry mama bear face, which really won't help anything.'  
'So what do you need me for?'  
'To process some evidence. I lifted some prints from her backpack and I need to confirm my suspicion that they're not hers.'

That wary eyebrow of Ressler's quirked up again. He wasn't entirely sure how running the prints was going to get them anywhere; for one, the real perpetrator's prints weren't going to be on file so there wasn't going to be anything to match them to and secondly, anyone of a dozen people aside from Agnes and the mystery thief could have left prints on her backpack –the day care centre staff, Liz, and Tom himself, just to name a few- but clearly Tom had one of his usual, hare-brained plans going on.  

Ressler mulled over the idea in his mind. For a moment, he lingered on the fact that no evidence was supposed to be processed without a case file number. There were ways around that which were easy enough, but he doubted that the higher ups would appreciate those steps being taken, nor the resources being used to investigate a group of toddlers.  

But, his curiosity remained piqued, and as much as Tom could get on his nerves at times, he did genuinely care about Liz and Agnes.  

Agnes was his goddaughter, for crying out loud... And Ressler wasn't about to let anyone kick his goddaughter out of day care over false accusations, nor did he want to witness his partner's angry mama bear face again in a hurry.  

'Send me the prints,' he reluctantly agreed, letting out a sigh, 'I'll see what I can do, but no promises.'  
'Thanks, man,' Tom murmured back, 'I owe you one.' Ressler tried desperately not to roll his eyes again as he hung up the phone. Barely a minute later, and the device still in his hand flashed with the warning of a new, incoming message; Tom, texting him the photos of the prints he had lifted from the backpack at home.  

Ressler could see it now... His day was about to get a whole lot busier.

/*/*/*/*

**_ARAM..._ **

Running the prints went about as well as Ressler expected. The resulting report turned up multiple sets of prints; Liz's, Tom's, half the centre staff, a set that matched Agnes' finger painting and was therefore most likely hers, and one mystery set.  

Though, according to the report, the mystery set was far from adult size. At only a fraction bigger than the prints belonging to Agnes herself, it was easy to conclude that the mystery prints belonged to another child at the day care centre... Which was exactly what Tom was after.  

It meant, after all, that another child had indeed been through her backpack.  

Agnes wasn't the thief. Now it was a question of figuring out who _was._  

And that was where it got complicated. They needed an entirely different set of skills for that.  

Well, not _technically._ In theory, both Tom and Ressler had the skills and resources to go undercover, infiltrating the centre to find the thief, or to launch a stakeout and surveillance operation on the day care centre, but even aside from the notion that Tom would be recognised by the staff, both of those options seemed to be going a bit far –or at least, for the moment.

So, they needed something a little more circumspect.

Which, was precisely how Aram found himself suddenly pounced on, with one set of hands grabbing him by the arm and tugging him sideways, and an exasperated voice hissing 'sssshhhhhhh' in his ear the second he tried to gasp in protest. It all happened so fast that all movement around him seemed to blur; one moment he was minding his own business, strolling from the centre of the war room towards the copy room as he so often did _without_ incident, and the next moment there he was, bundled quickly into the copy room only to find two sets of blue eyes staring back at him –one slightly shifty, and the other utterly exasperated.  

Aram simply blinked, processing that for a second.  

'Agent Ressler,' he sputtered, his gaze shifting hurriedly back and forth from one set of blue eyes to the other, 'Tom... What are you doing here?' Aram winced. 'I mean, uh, not that it's not nice to see you, because it is, but um, Liz isn't here, and-'  
'-I need you to look at some surveillance footage for me,' Tom's quiet voice interjected, 'discreetly.'  
'O-ok... Footage, uh, of what, exactly?'  
'Agnes' day care centre.'

Aram furrowed his brow. Well _that_ certainly explained why he was bundled into the copy room so quickly and why Ressler seemed so exasperated.  

It wasn't exactly a case-related request... Well, not an official FBI case, anyhow, and they were trying to keep it all on the downlow.

'Apparently one of the kids is some kind of psychopathic genius who's been stealing, and then framing Agnes for it,' Ressler explained drily, casting an incredulous glance in Tom's direction, 'we need to find out who, and preferably before Liz gets back.'

They followed him back to his workstation, the casual air about their strides ingrained from their respective operational training, and not at all matching their discreet but calculating gazes sweeping the room around them to make sure nobody was paying too much attention to their unofficial use of Bureau resources. Aram, meanwhile, scuttled warily on ahead, reaching straight for his keyboard. His fingers flew effortlessly across the keys as they always did, his attention focused intently on the screen in front of him as he easily worked his way into the day care centre's network and pulled up the feeds from their security cameras.  

It was almost too easy for someone who was used to working his way in to far more complex systems.

The NSA or foreign intelligences services, the Sunny Hill Day Care Centre was certainly _not._

This was the moment that, at last, Aram could manage to block out the prickling feeling on the back of his neck prompted by the two sets of particularly earnest eyeballs hovering behind him. He zeroed in on the camera pointing in the general direction of the cube shelving style cubby holes at one end of the centre that housed the backpacks of each of the twenty five kids. He zoomed in, finding Agnes' name on one of the shelves, only partly visible at the far edge of the frame, and then setting the last two days' worth of recording on fast forward, scanning for anyone who went near it.  

'There,' Tom's voice, soft but urgent all at once, echoed in Aram's ear. One hand came flying quickly over his shoulder from behind, pointing at the screen. There, right in the corner of the frame, was a shaggy, blonde-haired boy walking close by Agnes' cubby hole and then pausing, going very still.    
'Aram,' Ressler's voice sounded in his other ear, 'is there a better angle on that? We can hardly see what he's doing.'  
'That's the only camera that points anywhere near the bags,' he muttered back, quickly shaking his head, 'the others are all on entries and exits to the building, or at the reception desk.' Aram furrowed his brow again, trying to zoom in further, but the cameras were far from the advanced kind used in more secure buildings, and the footage immediately began to pixelate before they could get anywhere near seeing where the little boy was reaching. He was stopped right at the edge of the frame and half out of it. It was impossible to tell whether he was reaching into Agnes' cubby hole, or one of the few to the right of it, beyond the edge of the frame.  

Aram set the footage back onto fast forward.  

His shoulders tensed the longer they sat there, watching. He panned his gaze furtively around the war room, checking and double checking that Cooper wasn't about to come striding in, berating them for wasting Bureau time and resources when they were supposed to be doing real case work at the same time.  

Not that they _weren't_ doing their real case work at the same time –most of their paperwork was done and for the moment, they were stuck on moving forward until Liz called in her and Reddington's findings, but that was beside the point.  

'There's another one,' Ressler's voice jolted Aram's attention again from his mind's anxious wanderings, and he froze the footage again. There, was yet another child –a girl, this time- hovering half out of the frame, her guilt completely indeterminable. Behind him, Aram could hear a rumble of frustration echo from Tom's throat. The footage began to roll again, pausing only as it revealed one more child lingering in that irksome blind spot.  

With one more press of a button, the captured images of all three potential suspects came cascading from the printer and Aram swivelled his desk chair, glancing awkwardly back at the two standing behind him as he handed the photos over.  

Twenty four suspects were down to three... Which wasn't what they wanted, but it was better than nothing.  

Aram eyed the grimace on Ressler's face. It wasn't hard to know what the other man was thinking; the whole mess was ridiculous, but now that they had even further proof that Agnes was being accused of something she hadn't done, the cogs of his stubborn streak and determination for justice were grinding more and more furiously the longer they couldn't figure out who was setting her up.  

Simply hacking into the system wasn't going to cut it. They were going to have to go straight to the source.

/*/*/*/*

**_SAMAR..._ **

Samar was wondering how on earth she had been wrangled into this.

Actually, she knew _exactly_ how she had been wrangled into this, and somehow it seemed utterly ridiculous and completely reasonable all at once.  

Tom would be recognised, Aram wasn't at all confident, and Ressler –though now thoroughly convinced by the cause- was still locked in his own internal debate over whether going undercover in a day care centre to covertly collect the fingerprints of a trio of three year olds had officially reached the realm of too far in trying to uphold Agnes' good name.

Pretending to be a parent interested in touring the day care centre with the hope of sending her own child there wasn't the _most_ conventional use of her Mossad undercover training, but the very thing that had convinced each of the others to work the unorthodox case despite each of their own personal reservations, had served to convince Samar too; _nobody_ threatened to kick Agnes out of day care over false accusations.  

And so there she was, strolling through the centre with a sweet, fake smile plastered all over her face, trying to block out the noise from the comms piece in her ear of Tom, Ressler and Aram all bickering amongst themselves in the Bureau surveillance van parked outside on the street.  

'Are you sure we're not going to get reprimanded for this?' Aram asked.    
'Yes-'  
'-No.' Tom and Ressler's respective voices came through the earpiece almost simultaneously. Samar waited just long enough for the centre manager to look away from her and instead focus on some feature of their facilities that she was pointing out instead, before giving a quick shake of her head and rolling her eyes.    
'And you're sure we're not going to get caught?'  
'Aram, it's a child care centre, not an organised crime syndicate,' Tom tried to reassure him. 'She doesn't need to be a master spy to pull this off, and nobody's going to suspect her... And in the off chance they do, they're not going to kill her. She just has to get in, get their prints, and get out again.'

Samar cast her gaze around the day care centre's outdoor play area. The horde of three year olds seemed to have boundless energy, running around non-stop during their period of snack and free play time, and never in anything even vaguely resembling a straight line. It took her a moment before she managed to spot each of the three potential suspects, and within a second after that, she had already lost two of them all over again.

They moved so fast, every time she found one, the other two seemed to end up on the opposite side of the room in the blink of an eye.  

Samar took her breath, trying to focus her gaze on one at a time.  

Perhaps this exercise would be one to sharpen her skills, after all.  

'Ok Samar,' Aram's usual guiding voice caught her attention. Back in the van, he now had the live stream of the camera on the centre's back outer door that panned across the area, making it easier for him to keep track of all three of their targets. 'Two of them still have snacks in their hands so you should be able to just lift the wrappers, but the third one is over by the sandbox. You're going to have to do the pen drop for him.'  

'Remind me why I agreed to this?' Samar heard Ressler continue to mutter. For the most part, she ignored him, strolling past the first child and slipping the now empty potato chip bag from her hand with ease. The little girl, focused more intently on the last chip itself and then the playground, paid little attention to the disappearance of the wrapper that meant nothing to her.    
'For Agnes,' Tom murmured back. Careful, so as not to rouse the attention of the centre manager next to her with the rustling of plastic, Samar continued to ignore the voices in her ear and slipped the tiny bag in her jacket pocket, carrying on as if nothing untoward was happening at all. 'She's not going to get into a good college if she has a tainted record before she even gets to pre-school, and I'll be damned if I let Reddington pull strings to get her in anywhere instead.'

Samar struggled to stifle a smirk as her comms were suddenly filled with the silence of Ressler being unable to argue back against _that_ particular assessment of the situation.  

A level of annoyance at some of Reddington's antics was yet another area where the two of them held somewhat rocky, but still common ground.

She continued on. Near the sandbox, where her second target was busily pushing a miniature dump truck back and forth across the mountain of sand, Samar eyed a plastic shovel laying on the ground, seemingly and distractedly cast aside by another child whose attention had been caught by something else. Stepping ever closer to her target, Samar made careful and deliberate work of tripping over the shovel, managing to catch herself and land back on her feet after her stumble rather than landing flat on her face, but still dropping her pen in the sandbox, right in the path of the dump truck.

'Oh,' the centre manager gasped, 'I'm so sorry. These kids are always leaving the toys just laying around.'  
'No, no,' Samar sweetly reassured her, 'it's completely fine.' She glanced around, making a show of looking for her dropped pen, and allowing the manager to spot it first.  
'Jack,' she began, earning the attention of the little boy with the dump truck, 'pick up this nice lady's pen, please.' The little boy glanced down, picking up the pen in front of him and absentmindedly holding it up for her.    
'Oh, thank you, Jack,' Samar beamed, but the little boy simply shrugged his shoulders, and went back to his dump truck.

The pen slipped quickly into Samar's pocket, and on she went.  

Her last target wasn't much further ahead, the little boy's jaw working away slowly at some kind of granola bar while he stared off into the distance, day dreaming. The snack wrapper dangled loosely from his fingertips.

It should have been an easy steal.

...But as Samar rounded past him, her light pull on the wrapper's edge failed to ease it from sticky fingers. She turned on the spot, hovering awkwardly there as the manager pointed out some other part of the surrounding garden, oblivious to Samar's struggle behind her. Samar gave the wrapper another gentle tug, trying to work it free as the little boy with his back to her, gulped down his last bite and began to move, ready to go and play.  

Samar held on desperately to the edge with two fingers. If she couldn't snatch it from him, they would have no other way of collecting his prints without arousing suspicion.  

The little boy lurched forwards from his seat, rushing for the swings. Samar held on to the edge of the wrapper, wincing as she felt it pull against her fingertips.

...And then all of a sudden, the wrapper recoiled, tearing slightly as it unstuck from those tiny fingers, but remaining in her grasp and fluttering back to her all the same.  

Samar cleared her throat –anything, really, to cover the rustling noise as she hurriedly shoved it deep in her pocket before the centre manager turned to face her again. Her fingers curled protectively around her prize, and Samar instantly clenched her jaw, trying not to pull any kind of face in response to the soft, sticky sensation suddenly clinging to her thumb.  

She had collected all three sets of prints. Now, she just had to get out of there.  

It took another ten minutes of politely nodding her way through detailed talk of learning environments and enrolment paperwork and parents' codes of conduct but at last, Samar got there.  

She darted across the street from the day care centre, pulling the van's back door open with a certain gusto before stepping inside.

'How'd you go?' Tom asked quickly. A worried line creased his brow now, and the tiniest hint of anxiety wavered in his voice. They had gone much further than anticipated in trying to prove what should have been a simple error of suspicion, and he was starting to grow desperate. Samar broke into a grin.    
'Kids are cute, but gross,' she quipped. She pulled the pen and two wrappers from her pocket, waving them with a certain flourish under Ressler's nose. 'And I'd put these in an evidence bag if I were you,' she added, her expression sobering for a moment, 'one of these is pretty sticky and I'm not sure I really want to know why.'

Ressler's outstretched hand recoiled so quickly, he nearly fell off his chair.  

Tom made no effort whatsoever to stifle the chuckle that seemed to only intensify as Ressler collected himself again, shooting a particularly unimpressed scowl in his direction, while Samar flicked the sticky wrapper free from her fingers until it fell unceremoniously into the bag that Aram hurriedly held out instead.  

All they had to do now was match the mystery prints on Agnes' bag to one of their collected trio.

Surely, their case was now on the homeward stretch to being closed, and Agnes' name could be cleared.  

/*/*/*/*

**_LIZ..._ **

The day wore on, fading into evening. Tom settled Agnes into bed, then returned to the living room. Having wrapped up their _real_ case work for the day, Ressler, Aram, and Samar had all made their way there for the evening, trickling in one by one as each of their work tasks were complete and they were able to escape Cooper's watchful eyes without appearing to rush out all at once.  

Tom cast his gaze over the living room wall as he strode back into the room. Suffice to say, Agnes had enjoyed her evening of pizza and Disney movies with her godparents. Though she only had limited comprehension of what it meant to be accused of stealing and pulled out of day care for the day, she had at the very least picked up on the anxiety around her and spent most of the day somewhat subdued as a result. The evening spent being doted on by some of her favourite people had cheered her up immensely but now that she was sleeping like a log, the four adults in the room had a case to get back to. They had a match on the fingerprints, but they wanted a smoking gun, so to speak.

Part of the living room wall had turned into something resembling a miniature version of the Post Office case board, crime scene photos of Agnes' bag and missing belongings, fingerprint analysis results, stills from the surveillance footage Aram had wormed into, and more, all tacked to the wall with hurriedly scrawled Post-It note labels, slowly piecing the mystery together.  

Samar and Ressler were standing in the centre of the room, brows furrowed in deep concentration as they took it all in. Aram's head was buried in his laptop, his fingertips back to flying furiously across the keyboard again as he worked at whatever latest puzzle seemed to have taken his attention.  

Tom crossed the room to join Ressler and Samar in the centre, the three of them forming a jagged line of folded arms and faces contorted in perfectly synchronised contemplation.  

'So, uh, I kind of went down the rabbit hole on this,' Aram piped up. Tom, Ressler, and Samar all swivelled on the spot, turning to spot Aram's head pop up from behind his laptop screen behind them. 'Turns out,' he went on, 'the stealing only started after Halloway moved to Sunny Hill from another day care centre following accusations of him hitting other kids.'

Tom raised a single, wry eyebrow, the corners of his lips quirking with a curious smirk.  

'A history,' he murmured, giving a slow, thoughtful nod, 'that's promising.'  
'I also found surveillance footage of him swiping things from grocery store shelves when his mom wasn't looking on more than one occasion, doodling on a shopping cart with a Sharpie, and deliberately breaking a shopping basket during a temper tantrum. That's assault, shoplifting, and destruction of property,' Aram observed, shooting a momentary glower in the direction of the suspect photos on the wall, 'this kid is a serious juvenile delinquent.'

A noise escaped Ressler's throat at that –something halfway between a splutter and a strangled laugh. The frown of concentration vanished from his face in an instant, replaced just as quickly by a look of stunned incredulousness.  

'Please tell me you're joking,' he sputtered, 'you didn't actually write up an entire rap sheet for a three year old, did you?' Aram blinked, his face crumpling as it suddenly dawned on him just how swept up in the quest for Agnes' innocence he had allowed himself to become. Samar bit her lip, struggling to hold back her smirk at the same, while Ressler, rubbing a weary hand at his temple, slowly shook his head.    
'Yeah, I'd call that going down the rabbit hole,' Tom began to chuckle, stifling a grin, 'but it's all helpful. Thanks, Aram.'

A click sounded from the front door; the sort of click that would otherwise be run-of the mill, or even exciting for one awaiting the return home of a loved one from a work trip, but that sent a jolt of dread through the veins of the four operatives trying to keep their case on the quiet.  

Tom's eyes went wide. Ressler winced and darted a few steps across the room to partly block the view of the wall. Aram lowered his laptop lid in as careful a hurry as he could muster and Samar, ducking behind Ressler, tugged the worst of their case board from the wall and shoved it deep into her jacket pockets... But it wasn't enough. The time between door click and Liz rounding the door into the apartment felt like an eternity of frozen time to the four whose hearts had lurched into their throats, but in reality only gave them all of two seconds.  

Liz stepped inside, breaking into an instant smile at the sight of Tom standing in the middle of the room, and then a double take. Her gaze panned across the room, taking in everything else around him; the sheepish guilt spreading easily across Aram's face in the corner, and the photo slipping from the wall behind Samar, landing on the floorboards with clattering noise that only seemed to echo in the guilty silence that suddenly seemed to wash over the apartment. Ressler pulled a face that displayed such a rollercoaster of different thoughts that it was almost impossible to identify them all.  

'What's going on here?' Liz asked curiously.    
'Hey... Babe,' Tom slowly began. He wrapped one arm around her, dotting a quick kiss to her cheek, but he knew all too well that it wouldn't fool his wife for a second. 'So, uh, we've kind of had an adventure today.'  
'Mmmhmm,' Liz hummed back, letting out a wry smile. 'Cooper said over the phone that the Post Office was pretty quiet this afternoon.'

Everyone else bowed their heads, stuck there awkwardly and not at all sure how to interject in a way that wasn't going to make the situation ten times worse.  

Tom, however, held Liz's gaze. Those bright blue eyes of hers crinkled with an amused exasperation that did nothing to ease the cautious feeling clawing at him inside, but he knew better than to try and hide anything from her now.  

'You know that really grumpy lady that runs Sunny Hill?' He asked. Liz gave a quick nod. 'She _kind_ of accused Agnes of stealing the other kids' stuff and then her own to cover her tracks which, you know, is insane-'  
'-Tom-' She tried to interject, but Tom kept going.    
-'But the good news is we proved that the kid who was actually taking the other kids' stuff is-'  
'-Ethan Halloway?' Liz's musing voice brought a sudden end to Tom's hurried explanation. Her wry smile only widened as he gaped for a second, struggling to figure out how to respond. He and Liz had promised not to hide anything from each other and yet, that was exactly what he had done. The fact that technically, it was all for a good cause, was irrelevant. He was caught and yet, for some reason she didn't look upset.

If anything, she looked all too amused by it all.  

Tom blinked. Actually, that was almost _scarier._  

'His mom told me late last week that she found a few things in his bag that didn't belong to him,' Liz added, 'she's pretty embarrassed, and upset with him for doing it too. She was planning on handing them all back to the manager tomorrow, after she's thoroughly told Ethan off and collected every last thing he took.'

That strangled noise erupted from Ressler's throat for the second time in barely over as many minutes. He stared back at Tom, his face clouding with the thunder of utter exasperation.

'So we did all this,' he scoffed, one hand gesturing wildly at their unofficial case board and Aram still hovering awkwardly in the corner with his laptop; 'for _nothing?'_

Liz's gaze flickered to him, struggling not to let out a laugh. It wasn't at all difficult to figure out what they had been up to; Tom, as per usual, had dived straight into the deep end of clearing Agnes' name without thinking ahead to where it would land him while the others, not needing too much convincing where Agnes was concerned, had allowed themselves to be roped in in much the same way.  

'Well,' she mused, gentle fingertips tracing the soft stubble of his jawline, 'at least now you don't have to try and explain to the day care centre _how_ you managed to prove Agnes' innocence, right?' Her gaze flickered again, noting in her peripheral vision the way that Aram's eyes suddenly widened in horror, Samar's lip quirked up with a thoughtful smirk and Ressler winced, allowing his eyes to stay closed for an extra beat as he shook his head... But Liz's eyes only stayed on them for a moment. She looked back at Tom again, holding his gaze and watching the sheepish grin slowly etch its way across his face. It was kind of difficult in that moment not to love him for throwing everything to the wind for their little girl sleeping peacefully in the next room.  

'I was... Totally going to get to a plan for that,' he murmured back.    
'Mmhmmmm.'  

Sure, it was kind of difficult in that moment not to love him... But she was still not going to let him forget the extent of the escapades that he had dragged her team into in a hurry.  

Liz broke into a grin as she leaned in, pressing a slow kiss to his lips; _that_ would be a great thing to bring up the next time he started chuckling at her accidentally setting the kitchen on fire.  


End file.
